Posted
by
msmash
on Thursday April 20, 2017 @01:23PM
from the reality-check dept.

From a report: President-elect Donald Trump was very clear: "I will appoint a team to give me a plan within 90 days of taking office," he said in January, after getting a U.S. intelligence assessment of Russian interference in last year's elections and promising to address cybersecurity. Thursday, Trump hits his 90-day mark. There is no team, there is no plan, and there is no clear answer from the White House on who would even be working on what. It's the latest deadline Trump's set and missed -- from the press conference he said his wife would hold last fall to answer questions about her original immigration process to the plan to defeat ISIS that he'd said would come within his first 30 days in office. Since his inauguration, Trump's issued a few tweets and promises to get to the bottom of Russian hacking -- and accusations of surveillance of Americans, himself included, by the Obama administration.

That (a series or network of tubes) was actually a pretty good analogy to describe internet and its data flow to lay people.

Bandwidth, latency etc can be well understood with this analogy.

I think the people who laughed at this description of the Internet are severely imagination-deficient. And no, I have no idea what political side the guy who described the net thus is on, so I have no axe to grind either way.

Explaining by good analogy is actually an intellectual skill and a gift. Kind of like a box of chocolates...

Republicans only care about money. Can you do the job? Good. Get to work.

Except I'm a Never Trumper. I also turned down an IT job with the Meg Whitman for CA Governor campaign because I voted for the moderate conservative, Tom Campbell, in the Republican Primary in 2010 . And then there's the fact I switched my political registration before the 2016 election and voted for Hillary. And those ~8,000 comments on Slashdot...

What does that have to do with your original point that Republicans wont hire people that have the slightest criticism of their party?

The Trump Administration are turning away Republicans who criticized Trump in the past, leaving 500+ government positions open. Before the Trump Administration, every Democratic and Republican administrations had these positions filled by the 100th day.

With that quality of writing, you have probably lied about your education as well.

I spent eight years in Special Ed classes due to an undiagnosed hearing loss, skipped high school, went to community college to get an A.A. degree in General Education (1994), got kicked out of the university in my first year after playing too many games of Magic: The Gathering into the wee hours, and later went back to community college to get an A.S. degree in Computer Programming (20070 on a $3,000 tax return that George W. signed into law after 9/11.

Republicans only care about money. Can you do the job? Good. Get to work.

Cutting red tape to ribbons is an intrinsically easier job than building up effective layers of regulation that prevent the public interest being bent over a barrel, while the longest of all possible rubber gloves rummages around for the better part of a trillion dollars.

Evidently, no money was harmed in the operation.

The job, as I see it, is a little harder to accomplish, once you concede that there is such a thing as effective regulation, though it's yet far from a science; science also being a discipline where time after time ones best efforts fall short, and yet one perseveres.

In the best case scenario, even after regulation becomes more of science, it will still be double hard: hard to do and hard on the ego.

Kind of makes a guy want to double down on only caring about money, setting oneself up on a lavish private beach, and watching the glorious Egos soar.

What I don't get is why he hasn't done anything on infrastructure that he promised. This would more or less get bipartisan acceptance, generally it was one of his most popular promises. And for a real estate guy who like to build things, this should had been up his alley, to get his feet wet being a president. I am by no means a Trump supporter, but I live in the Trump Rust belt area, and I see in these areas that had voted for him, a rotting infrastructure, with post industrial cities that time had forg

Donald Trump, unfortunately, satisfies a common desire among the populance to right things by means that won't actually right them. It's a desire to rid Washington of inaction by cleaning it out of the current folks who don't seem to get anything done: and then you find that the things they were working on are harder than you understood. It's the feeling that you can get things going right by having a manager who lights a fire under the responsible people: just the way that bank managers pressured employees to increase revenue or be fired until those employees started opening accounts fraudulently for customers who hadn't asked for them.

What I am having a hard time with is how our country gets back out of this. I fear Humpty has had such a great fall that there is no peaceful recovery.

Don't count on things getting fixed. Trump always wanted to change the tax code and to enter public-private partnership projects. So that means new toll roads and bridges are going to be built but old ones won't be fixed, lead water pipes won't be replaced, leaking pipes won't be sealed and anything else that doesn't make money won't get done.

The Democrats won't vote for any spending package because they don't want Trump to have any wins that might help the GOP before the next round of voting. The environm

I think anyone who doesn't care, is uninterested in maintaining a rePUBLIC based on trust between the elites and the dronesUnder the Russian interventions, every drone is aware his/her awareness was twisted by coordinated lies and "fake news" to create a 'scandal' that handed America to the elitesDon't believe me?Find the Cabinet members who aren't 1%

That's funny. Anyone who cared about "day one" promises from the last president was racist.

No they really weren't. Sure you could find a few loudmouths who say stupid shit on the internet and sometimes in print. So what? I can find literal Nazis who support Trump but that doesn't make all Trump voters literal Nazis.

There was no general zeitgeist about expecting Obama to keep policies being racist. I remember considerable criticism here from back in the day when he didn't do anything about the PATRIOT act for example. You know what? People manage to use strong language without engaging in racial slurs and no one called them racist.

Not according to Chris Matthews of MSNBC, basically in his view anyone who disagreed with Obama was racist, that was their primary motivation for disagreement. He was not the only one to subscribe to this narrative, but probably had the highest profile and outreach.

The fact you could find some idiots who would yell "racist" over any criticism about Obama is about as relevant as finding flat-earthers who voted for Trump. That didn't mean that was ever a thing in any kind of general sense.

Obama had both houses of congress with a supermajority in the senate. So no, he lied.However, for some reason, no politician who is not a pathological liar seems to be successful in the US above the local level, so I guess we really do have the government we deserve.

Obama had both houses of congress with a supermajority in the senate. So no, he lied.

And during that time he got things like healthcare done. He does still need cooperation from congress, just because they're dem doesn't mean they'll do whatever he says. See trump and his healthcare boondoggle.

Obama had both houses of congress with a supermajority in the senate. So no, he lied.

Obama had a supermajority for a month or so around July-August, 2009 (when Al Franken finally got confirmed to his seat) from Sep 2009 (when Ted Kennedy's replacement was sworn in) until Feb 2010 (when Scott Brown was sworn in to replace Kennedy's replacement).

For every dollar spent investigating a corrupt oligarch-led culture that has successfully compromised the integrity of the world's most powerful nation we buy a small semblance of continuity with the ideals to which we should adhere whether a con-man usurper has taken the highest seat in the land or someone who merely sent emails.

... They had moles in the FBI, DoJ as well as the White House. Hence the meet between Clinton & Lynch on the airport tarmac when the two don't even know each other. Coincidence? Not likely. Rigging/payoff...

I think Comey's sudden announcement of more Emails to investigate nearly on the eve of the election, on a Friday Afternoon, seems way more influential and suspicious than the crap fake news you quoted. You could see a 10 point swing in the polling numbers after that.

Trump got into power by nothing but bluster. He isn't going to be able to deliver on more than 5% of what he promised on the campaign trail. With a Republican majority in the Senate and the House of Representatives he STILL couldn't repeal Obamacare. With the deck stacked entirely in his favor he still can't deliver.

About half of Congressional Republicans hate him with passion — and would rather collude with the opposition than with him.

As to the original point about being "surprised" — no. After Obama's failing to close Guantanamo for eight years (two of them with that deck really stacked in his favor), Presidents failing to deliver on their core promises does not surprise me one bit...

The pattern is clear - Candidates make big promises but once they get in to office they quickly realize that the temporary insanity known as election season doesn't jive with reality. The President gets access to a whole lot of eye-opening cold hard reality and quickly finds that what they talked up on the trail is usually either impossible, a really terrible idea, or both.

Juggling reality with pleasing your constituents is the Presidents job and it's a tough one. The average American believes some fantasti

All presidents break a sizable portion of their campaign promises. Some of them are promises they couldn't fulfill. Others are promises that they changed their mind on, or never had any will to fulfill.

Trump was amusing, in that he broke a lot of his promises before he even took office (such as prosecuting Hillary). They're all the same though in one regards: Presidential candidates of all parties say what they think will get them elected moreso than they say what they really intend to do.

About half of Congressional Republicans hate him with passion — and would rather collude with the opposition than with him.

And why is that such a bad thing? In a responsible, reasonable government there should be collaboration between the ruling and opposition parties. How else do you expect to actually get things done that can actually last instead of just getting scrapped as soon as the next party comes into power? Sadly, in US politics these days if you are seen even eating in the same restaurant as someone from the other party you are vilified and torn down the next time you come up for re-election as a traitor to the party. It's pretty sad, really, how much American political parties operate like the Soviet Communist party did, where loyalty to the party supersedes everything else.

I passed no judgment, actually. I just pointed out, the deck is not stacked in Trump's favor — certainly not "entirely".

Sadly, in US politics these days if you are seen even eating in the same restaurant as someone from the other party you are vilified and torn down the next time you come up for re-election as a traitor to the party.

Apparently, people are periodically shifting in their opinion on whether or not party-loyalty [economist.com] (and consequent predictability) are a good t

I passed no judgment, actually. I just pointed out, the deck is not stacked in Trump's favor — certainly not "entirely".

Sadly, in US politics these days if you are seen even eating in the same restaurant as someone from the other party you are vilified and torn down the next time you come up for re-election as a traitor to the party.

Apparently, people are periodically shifting in their opinion on whether or not party-loyalty [economist.com] (and consequent predictability) are a good thing. For every time you blast one's sticking to the party line, I can counter, that it is good thing, that a politician not doing that is not fulfilling the promise his party-affiliation made to the electorate.

The best example I can think of it that damn loyalty and support pledge the Republicans were demanding all Presidential candidates take, promising that they would support the nominee no matter who it was. How can you stand there one day and tell people that someone is incompetent, wrong, and unfit to rule, and then turn around and declare your full and unconditional support to them the next? Either you lied to the electorate or you are giving up on your principles, both in the name of party loyalty.

About half of Congressional Republicans hate him with passion — and would rather collude with the opposition than with him.

If this were the case the House Intelligence Committee Republicans wouldn't be dragging their feet on the Russia investigation.

They may not like Trump, but they hate the Democrats more, and if they were to start working with Democrats, they'd upset a good number of their voting base.

After Obama's failing to close Guantanamo for eight years (two of them with that deck really stacked in his favor)

He actually WAS working on closing it down, by transferring detainees out of Guantanamo. He was making pretty good progress until Republicans took over congress under his watch. The Republican congress refused to produce a bill for Obama to sign that didn't restrict funds being used to continue the shut-down of Guantanamo. He had vetoed a number of bills that included language that restricted his ability to close Guantanamo, but they continued to push it on nearly every spending bill that came his way. He either had to sign the bills reluctantly, or go without funding for our military or our government in general.

About half of Congressional Republicans hate him with passion — and would rather collude with the opposition than with him.

If this were the case the House Intelligence Committee Republicans wouldn't be dragging their feet on the Russia investigation.

They may not like Trump, but they hate the Democrats more, and if they were to start working with Democrats, they'd upset a good number of their voting base.

Many republicans may not like Trump, but they realize that they have to be careful in how they handle anything that might bring Trump down. Mid term elections and next general election will be impacted by Trump's approval ratings.

High approval ratings for Trump will mean Republicans will have an advantage going into elections. Low approval ratings for Trump could mean many Republicans lose their seats.

Right or wrong many people view the parties based upon how/what the president is doing. Trump may not be

If there was nothing to investigate, the why did Devin Nunes as chair of the House Intelligence committee call a hearing on the subject? If he wanted to talk about leaks, he could have called hearings on leaks. If he didn't want to talk about Russians, he could have just not scheduled a hearing on Russians.

Trump got in to office by being lucky enough to run against Hillary Clinton. A huge part of the GOP electorate would vote for a ticket of Kim Jong-Un with Mahmood Ahmedinejad just to keep someone named Clinton out of the white house. Any republican other than Trump would have wiped the floor with her; he was just such an atrociously awful example of a human being that there were people who had second thoughts or just simply stayed home.

Now that said, any democrat who wasn't named Clinton would have wiped the floor with Trump. Sanders would have annihilated him - indeed he polls better with self-identified conservatives than does Trump - as would any of a number of other people. Hell Jimmy Carter could have beaten him if he could have been talked into running.

The only reason Trump was nominated was the R establishment saw this as a losing year.

If anyone but Hillary had been running, they would have just put up an establishment candidate, and almost certainly lost in the general.

Of course the Ds will take the exact WRONG lesson from this and pivot left. Giving Trump eight years.

So the Democrats can only win if they pivot right, essentially becoming establishment Republicans, which were trounced by Trump in the primary and who even you say would lose in the general to anyone but Hillary?

Sanders has done orders of magnitude more volume of honest work than Trump. Trump was born with more than a silver spoon in his mouth, he had the whole fucking dining set. He didn't only benefit from the enormous loan that his father gave him, but also from his father's connections to the dodgiest lawyers in all of NYC - who were happy to defend him to the end for the right price.

Found the guy who only learned "facts" about Sanders from their preferred news sources.

From Wikipedia [wikipedia.org]: After graduating from college, Sanders returned to New York City, where he initially worked at a variety of jobs, including Head Start teacher, psychiatric aide, and carpenter.[35] In 1968, Sanders moved to Vermont because he had been "captivated by rural life." After his arrival there he worked as a carpenter,[36] filmmaker, and writer[51] who created and sold "radical film strips" and other educational m

Eight years? Yeah, right. Trump will be lucky to make two. If he doesn't force congress to impeach him, or resign on his own, his "incredible" health will certainly fail him. He makes Newt Gingrich look like Richard Simmons.

Eight years? Yeah, right. Trump will be lucky to make two. If he doesn't force congress to impeach him, or resign on his own, his "incredible" health will certainly fail him. He makes Newt Gingrich look like Richard Simmons.

I would almost prefer Trump to Pence to be honest.

Pence is not quite so obviously bat insane. Pence is probably more conservative than Trump, he's also more liked by his own party than Trump, so will be able to get more passed.

Sure, Pence won't do the ludicrous racist and xenophobic things that Trump is trying (and failing for the most part) to pass but he could potentially be more damaging to our economy long term.

If Trump doesn't get us into a ridiculous war, he can't get as much done as Pence could. Pe

Personally I'm hoping that when Trump gets impeached or resigns, we find that Pence is tied in to the machine substantially enough to warrant his resignation as well. Just because we almost never see them in the same room doesn't mean Pence doesn't know what's going on; he is vastly more informed on how DC works than is Trump (although the same could be said for the couch in the Oval Office).

Hopefully it will trigger a crisis substantial enough to trigger a special federal election, otherwise the next

That's pretty wishful thinking. As long as Republicans control at least one house of Congress, he will not be impeached. He is too egotistical to resign. And based on actuarial data, he can expect to live about 15 more years. Keep in mind: he's never smoked, he doesn't drink and he has the best healthcare money can buy. https://www.washingtonpost.com... [washingtonpost.com]

Trump wouldn't have needed Congressional approval, Senate confirmation, even a budget hearing. Just ask his Chief of Staff to hire some people. That's it. Done. Simple, promise kept, cross it off the list (uhh, is there a list?) Instead, he tweeted a lot of nonesense, rubber-stamped a bunch of stuff from Ryan and the Generals, and played golf at his estate on weekends at taxpayer expense.

Ok, I get it that some people just hate Dems, foam at the mouth and all. But this guy is doing a lot of nothing [washingtonpost.com], all

He's making tons of money off of all this. I kind of wonder if that wasn't the entire idea (plus some ego-stroking) to begin with.

For instance, we, the taxpayers, are paying for things like the Secret Service to use space at the Trump properties he's spending time at (not to mention his wife and son). His kids are using the status and access to improve their business dealings (which also benefit him). He never divested any of his holdings - he just handed direct control of the operations to his son, while

And yet we've gotten to a point where politics is so ridiculously polarized that none of the Republicans care about him looting the public treasury and taking bribes from anyone and everyone, as long as he's not a Democrat.

We've also gotten to the point that it doesn't matter if he reverses himself (aka "flip-flops") on his campaign promises. Used to mean hot death for a politician from his... base. But now...

There is not a single person, anywhere, who actually expected him to even begin to deliver on this promise. He says whatever the hell he feels like saying in the moment and has absolutely no interest whatsoever in actually doing the work of running a country--then or now.

Please stop pretending otherwise. Things are bad enough without this layer of affectation.

You really expected these people to keep their promises? Does everybody vote for them just so they can have something to complain about? Don't expect to be taken seriously when you consistently reelect over 95% of them. You reward them for lying, so I hope you don't expect them to stop doing so.

Continuous behaviors of ineptitude in the highest office of this land. With precedents like this being put in place, all of our future POTUS' don't even need to worry about lifting a finger in Washington.. You can just work on your golf game for four years on the taxpayer dime.

At last, we finally have undeniable proof that Donald J. Trump is a deep cover Russian agent sent here decades ago to hand the U.S. over to Russia! And to think, they called us all delusional, hysterical crackpots, with zero critical thinking skills, all throwing childish temper tantrums because our candidate lost a close election. The fools! Vindication is now ours!

Oh good! Looks like everyone was the winner then! Since you only cared about your candidate winning the popular vote and Trump supporters only cared about winning the election everybody wins! Guess Trump was right about winning so much you'd get tired of winning. Sounds like you are already tired and salty since you know, you won.

Considering that many Trump advisers are under FBI investigation for collusion, that Trump owes tons of money to Russian banks, and that Donald Trump still can't speak a hurtful word about his puppet master Vladimir Putin, maybe you should examine your own critical thinking skills.

The FBI considers the Pee-Tape dossier to be a credible document, as they have corroborated several parts of that document.

Also attorney general Jeff Sessions lied under oath about his collusion with Russia.

Trump is full of all talk, little action, and most of that is misguided. He doesn't seem to have the first clue as to what he's doing, and his administration is either following that lead, or following Trump's only other plan, which is loot as much as possible before leaving office.

The guy is no longer president, what administration are they talking about? To the best of my knowledge, since leaving office, Barack Obama seems to be taking a bit of a breather from politics for at least the time being. Sounds like baseless finger-pointing, if you ask me.

The administration is way behind on filling much more important positions than this. Last month suddenly reversed themselves on the US attorneys staying on until there are replacements... fine, but as of today there aren't any nominees for any of the 93 prosecutor positions, because they haven't filled the undersecretary level positions that do that. Justice is also missing a number of key appointees for national security positions.

There's the same story at state, where over half of the high level appointees have yet to be named, including officials to oversee the Middle East or nuclear anti-proliferation.

The confusing situation with the USS Vinson might well have something to do with the fact that a number of important second and third tier DoD positions haven't been filled, and the same at the Executive Office of the President. A lot of what those people a teir or two below the top do is make sure the right hand knows what the left is doing.

Cybersecurity is an important issue, but the administration doesn't have the people in place to set up and run such a team yet.

The administration is way behind on filling much more important positions than this. Last month suddenly reversed themselves on the US attorneys staying on until there are replacements... fine, but as of today there aren't any nominees for any of the 93 prosecutor positions, because they haven't filled the undersecretary level positions that do that. Justice is also missing a number of key appointees for national security positions.

There's the same story at state, where over half of the high level appointees have yet to be named, including officials to oversee the Middle East or nuclear anti-proliferation.

The confusing situation with the USS Vinson might well have something to do with the fact that a number of important second and third tier DoD positions haven't been filled, and the same at the Executive Office of the President. A lot of what those people a teir or two below the top do is make sure the right hand knows what the left is doing.

Cybersecurity is an important issue, but the administration doesn't have the people in place to set up and run such a team yet.

He could probably get appointments made if he actually took the job seriously. I'd liken his choices with the Pope saying to all of the cardinals that he'd like the freaking Anti-Christ to be the Papal Nuncio or something like that. All of his sensible appointments went through rather quickly. The rest have been delayed as long as humanly possible.

Maybe he hasn't appointed a task force to look into Russian hacking because he can't find anyone who can lie convincingly about the subject to actually fool anyone?
Meanwhile there's an ongoing independent investigation into possible Russian tampering with the November election. Oh, and by the way: Russian has also been tampering with elections in other countries, too, and Russia appears to be where much of the cyber-hacking in the world originates from. Not like this idea came out of nowhere.

There is no provision in law to declare the election null and void. The House certified the results of the Electoral College, therefore Trump is the actual president. There must be an impeachment and a conviction to remove him. Then the Presidency passes down the order of succession as defined in The 25th Amendment and the Presidential Succession Act.

"The last thing we need in this country right now, considering the socio-political climate of the entire planet, is a p

Show of hands, who was sitting on their hands, waiting for the incoming administration to ramp up a cyber security team to help democrats secure their private, non-government email servers? In providing guidance to geniuses like Jpn Podesta to NOT use 'password' as the password on your work GMAIL account?

Seriously, Democrats ignored warnings from FBI that they were being targeted by hackers, the Republicans heeded the warning, with predictable results in both cases.

On the basis of this information I conclude that there are more intelligent people on Slashdot than on most internet forums. Though if I had wanted a floating box docked to the top right of the screen obscuring what I was reading I would have fcuking asked for it.